[rileycrane]

When there's no Bestie, the Bestie page offers Choose your bestie: pick one of your agents or create one. If you delete your Bestie, the account is set to none, so the page shows the chooser instead of an agent that's gone. For now only agents on this device are offered.

This branch includes #1935 (clay/bestie-pinned-nav, merged at ce6734793 in 1ffa2e59b). It will be rebased once #1935 merges. Review only the commits listed below; the merge commit is listed for context only.

Commits to review

• eb45012e5 feat(bestie): choose an existing agent or create one. This ports the ChooseBestie component from feat(bestie): pin the saved Bestie DM #1935's earlier head (ce6734793..f78963029) onto the stack. The stack keeps its Bestie and Former Bestie tabs, check-in cleanup, and remembers-on.
• 6c2e161e8 feat(bestie): offer local agents in place, and remember from the sidebar.
• f5a7c875e feat(bestie): deleting your Bestie saves none to the account.
• cd653c6fc fix(bestie): clear a deleted Bestie once the account is read, and turn away a hosted agent made here.
• b024c3c57 test(bestie): expect Choose your bestie on the empty Bestie page. plugin-defaults and sidenav-polish waited for the old "Meet your Bestie" heading.
• For context only: 1ffa2e59b merges feat(bestie): pin the saved Bestie DM #1935. The conflicts in the README, index.tsx and default-agent.ts were resolved to keep both sides.

What changes

• Choose your bestie. The empty Bestie page lists your agents and has New agent. It says "Only agents on this device can be your Bestie for now." Hosted agents aren't listed. If you create a hosted agent from this page, it isn't made Bestie, and the page says why.

• No longer here. If the saved Bestie isn't one of your agents anymore, the pinned Bestie says "Zed is no longer here. Choose another agent to be your bestie." The same chooser is shown in place, so you don't have to leave the page.

• Deleting your Bestie saves none. It clears only if the account still holds that agent's pubkey, using the null writer from feat(bestie): remove your Bestie, and only local agents can be Bestie for now #2041. It saves nothing in these cases:

  • another device has chosen a different Bestie;
  • a choice made here is still saving.

  If the account hasn't been read yet, the delete is remembered and the clear happens when the read returns that pubkey.

• A choice from the sidebar (chooseBestie) fires onBestieMade, so remembers-on applies to it as well as to the Bestie tab.

Try it (just dev)

1. Use a fresh account, or Remove your Bestie (feat(bestie): remove your Bestie, and only local agents can be Bestie for now #2041). The Bestie page shows Choose your bestie. Pick a local agent: it becomes your Bestie, with Remembers you on.
2. Delete that agent. The Bestie page shows Choose your bestie again, not a ghost of the deleted agent.
3. If you have a hosted agent, it isn't in the list.

Checks

• tsc, biome --error-on-warnings and design:check pass.
• vitest: 103 files, 1853 tests passed, 1 skipped. This covers the bestie, agents and channels directories, solo, native-sidebar, session-main-agent, pages.integration, entity-navigation, readmes, BestieNavigation and ChannelInventory.
• plugin-defaults.spec.mjs and sidenav-polish.spec.mjs pass 24/24 on chromium and webkit with the new heading.
• New browser check tests/browser/bestie-choose.spec.mjs passes 4/4 (chromium and webkit). It renders the production Bestie page twice: with no Bestie, and with a Bestie that's no longer here. In both, it opens the chooser and confirms that the local agent is offered and the hosted one isn't.
• An independent agent review was done. Its fixes are in cd653c6fc, each with a test that fails without it.

Known gaps

• Read-then-write race. The clear reads the account and then writes; there's no compare-and-swap. Another device's choice made in that gap can be overwritten with none.
• No retry. If the account read inside the clear fails, the clear isn't retried. It logs "The deleted Bestie wasn't cleared from your account".
• Signed-out sessions. A session that has ended can stay in the list of accounts until it's collected. A delete in that window can log the same warning without effect.
• A failed first choice keeps the choice unknown until the next successful save.
• Dead hosted-setup code. setup.ts, prompt.ts and testing.ts are no longer used. They're left in place, as in f789630.
• Fewer page tests. The port drops three page-level tests from index.test.tsx, as feat(bestie): pin the saved Bestie DM #1935's f789630 does. PinnedBestie's chooser test checks that the chooser appears, but doesn't pick an agent.
• Out of scope: matching pinned DMs, navigation and search, Catch me up, hosted agents.

The ChooseBestie port is co-authored by Clay Delk, from #1935.

Stack: each PR is based on the one before it: #2034 Bestie tab → #2035 Remembers you → #2036 private channels → #2037 check-ins → #2039 Former Bestie → #2041 Remove as Bestie → #2047 Choose your bestie (this PR). #2040 (recent notes in Claude Code prompts) is separate and based on main.

Overlap: #1716 also changes features/agents/service.ts and tabs.tsx. Whichever lands second will rebase onto the other.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code